Science Fiction Studies

#87 = Volume 29, Part 2 = July 2002

Tom Moylan

Utopia, the Postcolonial, and the Postmodern

Ralph Pordzik.
The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian
Novel in New English Literatures. New York: Lang, 2001. 199 pp.
$53.95 hc.

Until recently, utopian literature has been
considered and commented upon in a largely Western European-North American
context. As a look at the conference programs of the Society for Utopian Studies
in North America and the Utopian Studies Society in Britain demonstrates,
however, scholars and critics are at last turning to the exploration of Utopia
beyond (and in some cases before) the boundaries of Utopia’s eponymous Western
origins. As well, Nan Bowman Albinski has written on Australian utopias and
dystopias; Lucy Sargisson has recently completed an extensive period of research
on New Zealand intentional communities; and some of us are beginning to look at
Irish culture through a utopian lens. And, with his usual thoroughness, Lyman
Tower Sargent has in the past few years added bibliographies of Australian,
Canadian, and New Zealand utopias to his already important bibliography of
British and American utopian literature; he is now turning his attention to
Ireland.

Thus it is timely to see the publication of
Ralph Pordzik’s The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia, for here we get an
extended study of utopian writing beyond its familiar Western confines. While
Pordzik makes claims about the fate of Utopia in the larger scope of
postcolonial literature, he especially considers "utopian fiction written
in English-speaking countries all over the world" (1) and brings our
attention to the degree to which writers in countries such as Australia, Canada,
India, Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria, Scotland, and South Africa have taken up
this decidedly Western form and worked with, and more so against and beyond, it
in the various contexts of their own historical time and space. He then focuses
on texts from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa—although he
also includes some works from Africa, India, Ireland, and Scotland, such as
Buchi Emecheta’s The Rape of Shavi (1983) from Nigeria, Amitav Ghosh’s
The Calcutta Chromosome (1997) from India, Eilis Dhuibne’s The Bray
House (1990) from Ireland, and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in 4
Books (1981) from Scotland. Interestingly, he does not address works from
the anglophone Caribbean.

As a result of this emphasis, Pordzik’s
study offers an insight into the workings of the utopian imagination in a
postcolonial moment of four former white settler colonies. A larger comparative
discussion can now move forward, as Pordzik’s initial work is taken up by
others; as attention is brought to bear on utopian writing in the non-European
cultures of Africa, Asia, and the Americas; and as the discussion extends to a
comparative examination of utopian writing in languages other than English.
Pordzik, however, has begun the task; and it is important to look closely at his
analysis and argument.

Drawing on Wilson Harris’s The Womb of
Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (1983), he employs the method of what
he calls "cross-cultural comparison" and identifies a common
"cross-cultural" strategy in the texts he examines. Within this
framework, he chooses to work at the intersection not only of utopian and
postcolonial literatures but also of postmodernism. This critical triangulation
consequently leads him to privilege one tendency in utopian writing in these
"new" contexts, and it also produces certain silences and gaps.

To begin his analysis, Pordzik makes the
familiar assertion that the Anglo-American literary utopia has reached a point
of "exhaustion," wherein its "attempts to create a radically
different society based on humanist or Marxist ideals" have resulted in
nothing more than "totalitarian rule—put into effect in the name of
justice and equality" (4). Thus, rather than seeing the new work as yet
another turn in the long road of utopian textuality, he posits a qualitative
break wherein an "international culture" of postcolonial writers has
written against the utopian tradition and produced a heterotopian variant that
embraces a new level of literary hybridity. Working with a selection of texts
that begins around 1970—such as Janet Frame’s Intensive Care (1970)
from New Zealand and David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
(1971) from Australia—he characterizes this open and self-reflexive approach
as one that has allowed writers to explore "the future of their respective
countries from a distinctly postcolonial cross-cultural point of view"
(156).

Pordzik argues that the formal conventions of
postmodernity and the utopian imagination have both been transgressed and
expanded by this postmodern, postcolonial, utopian kind of writing. The result
is a body of work that he names as "utopographic metafiction," as it
offers a "fictional strategy to disrupt the hierarchized relation between
reality and fiction which dominates traditional utopian writing with its
ideological bias towards social realism and the systemic closure it ministers
to" (133). In these works, he finds that the utopian imagination "is
much more indebted to the inexhaustible creative and spiritual powers than to
any static political ideal or principle premised on a rationally conceived
universe and its faith in the resourcefulness of reason, technology, and social
progress" (134). On this "new imaginative terrain," he argues,
the system of colonialism as well as those later systems based in concepts and
practices of socialism or nationalism are exposed as coercive and rejected in
favor of a "cross-cultural dialogue" that privileges a radical
"otherness in a new and varied evolution of community" (quoting Harris
143).

Carrying his understanding of the interior and
aesthetic valence of these texts further, Pordzik argues that this
"revisionist momentum" tends toward a form of "subjective
utopia" or "intopia" which, as he develops his survey of texts,
appears to oscillate between the extremes of an anti-utopianism that rejects
systemic, collective social dreaming and a utopianism of alterity that favors
continual openness and flux rather than "embarrassingly transformative
scenarios" (144, 146, 149). In Pordzik’s readings, Utopia comes about not
by socio-political transformation but by "fiction-making" (150). While
that fiction-making continues to foreground the development of democratic,
egalitarian communities based in cultural and racial pluralism, it more
fundamentally delivers an aesthetic articulation that challenges even these
provisional "eutopian" achievements (those within its pages and those
in the material world). Thus, a "postmodern contract" produces a
"common concern" in a pan-national set of texts that celebrates
"the self-authenticating powers of the literary text" as it ranks
imagination over reason and initiates a "broader transculturation process
within which the different writers can position their own particular views of
race, gender, and identity with regard to futurity" (158, 164). The
tendency Pordzik identifies and favors, therefore, is one marked by a shift from
the "progressively utopian to the dialectically heterotopian" (165),
and this leads him in the last words of his book to conclude that the "only
factor which can in the long run change the world is the word" (173). What
guides Pordzik’s work is a "cross-cultural strategy" that arises out
of the claim and assertion of difference in the postcolonial world. Arising from
political and cultural movements that opposed the authority not only of former
colonies but also of new nations with their privileged players, this aesthetic
logic of disruption and difference informs new writing that dares to imagine
social spaces and horizons unfettered by hierarchical controls and power.
Pordzik thus argues that a shift away from literary utopia’s realist tendency
toward an embrace of the fantastic (in several forms, including magical realism)
generates a new cultural energy that plays out globally among the writers of
this shared literary tendency, however differently it is manifested in each of
its spaces and moments. Indeed, he takes care to assert that the aim of his
comparative reading is not to erase all specificity; and yet he argues
forcefully for recognition of a "global culture" (based in racial and
gender diversity) that has produced a body of "transnational ... fictions
which, although their stress is on difference and diversity, consolidate the
multitude of narratives they draw on in a strikingly new and coherent
representational contract" (117).

Consequently, this complex array of work by
those who are "ex-centric and un-privileged" is distilled in Pordzik’s
analysis into what he sees as a postcolonial "meditation among cultures in
conflict" that serves to "turn a pessimism derived from historical
violence into an optimistic hope for imaginative rebirth" (125). Citing
Harris, he celebrates this break from the claustrophobia of the West in favour
of an "epistemological otherness" (with its echoes of the arguments of
liberation theology’s epistemological privileging of the poor) that offers a
"corrective gesture of dehierarchization and renewal" (130). Further,
in an interesting juxtaposition with Harris, he invokes Lyotard and argues that
this creative rupture produces "counter-intuitive propositions" which
are "experientially impossible as well as empirically unverifiable, and
which create as they work towards a different geometry of cognition new
identifying spaces in the realm of utopian discourse" (131).

Not surprisingly, many of the works in Pordzik’s
study reach back to the tradition of satire and adopt a dystopian rather than
eutopian form in their literary quest for Utopia. In rejecting the imposed
utopian locus of the colonial powers, the postcolonial writers often create
dystopias that begin with the negativity of rejecting the colonial system (along
with the "ignominious role of western humanism") and then move on to
challenge the post-colonial nation that has replaced it (42). In the same
self-reflexive spirit that runs through all these works, the dystopian variants
not only interrogate the given society but also transform the literary form
itself, in this case "disabusing themselves of the tragic proportions
(Harris) of western dystopian thought" (130). Thus they reconfigure the
classical dystopia and open up a space of hope by generating eutopian elements
within the dystopian narrative (see, for example, the discussion of Nadine
Gordimer’ s July’s People [1981] as creating "an open-ended
utopian horizon out of the desolation of the dystopian present" [63]).

Pordzik’s reassessment of the utopian genre
in this particular context is a significant contribution to both utopian studies
and postcolonial studies (as well as to the debates on postmodernism). He
introduces an intriguing range of texts, and he makes a strong argument for the
social import of this new direction in utopian writing that shares the
sensibility of a heterotopian imagination based in Homi Bhabha’s
"borderline culture of hybridity" (7). His is also a position that
needs to be questioned, however, both for what it says and for what it silences.
My concern is that Pordzik’s analysis of this intertext of post-Western
utopian writing (to step back from the terms postcolonial and postmodern)
closes down the very specificity and complexity of the individual texts that he
studies. When he argues that these works avoid "a fixed counter-position or
counter-ideology" and transcend national and ideological boundaries in
order to produce a radical new cultural otherness (104), he risks eviscerating
and de-valuing the very cultural and political plenitude and power of this
literary tendency by stepping away from and thus effacing the historical
conditions and political-cultural struggles that helped to produce such works in
the first place.

Part of the problem is that Pordzik falls into
his own set of idealized binaries. Against the Western utopia—with its
"embarrassingly transformative scenarios"—he identifies in the
postcolonial utopia an emphasis on "cross-cultural mediation" and open
societies that "defies easy reduction and simple comforting solutions"
(149, 78, 80). In several passages, he makes the by now questionable assertion
that Western utopias advance a narrative of static perfection, and he
also repeats the now common condemnatory conflation of the distinct practices of
totalitarian rule and totalizing analysis.1 He also tends to read all
instances of nation or nation-building as authoritarian and hierarchical, to
equate all exercises of armed struggle with terrorism, and generally to regard
rational critique and political transformation as compromised and corrupt.
Collecting these various positions within his abstract version of utopia, he
thus casts a large postmodern, poststructuralist net not only over the
mechanisms of the utopian imagination but also over many elements of modernity’s
oppositional matrix. Rather than engaging in a nuanced critique and working with
the complexities of both oppositional politics and utopian writing as each
mutates in specific conditions, he opts for an overarching binary that allows
him to leap from an hypostasized concept of Western utopia to an idealized
postcolonial heterotopia without extensively considering the creative and
political activity in between.

Thus, while he recognizes in several texts the
important function of materially, historically-based movements of positionality
and struggle (however provisional, compromised, or limited), he generally moves
on to his preferred valorization of a post-revolutionary utopian approach
produced in a framework cleansed of such location and contradiction and now
operating in a global postcolonial imaginary that gives greater weight to the
subjective, the spiritual, and the word. While his positive recognition of
"cultural decentralization" and "cross-cultural exchange" is
admirable in its rejection of the all-too-common and insidious closure of
oppositional movements by friend and foe alike, Pordzik’s focus on the
heterotopian variety of new postcolonial writing tends to neglect or undervalue
other textual and political possibilities that might be discovered in the spaces
between his antinomies of Western utopia and postcolonial heterotopia.

One category that could help to break through
this binary and make sense of the various texts that fall within the resultant
analytical gap is the critical utopia, which develops in the radical
cultures of the West in the 1970s (where Pordzik begins his account) and which
possesses many of the formal qualities and political/ethical sensibilities of
postcolonial utopian writing (e.g., Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
[1974], Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time [1976], Joanna Russ’s
The Female Man [1975]). To be fair, Pordzik does mention the term in his
discussion of one of his texts (see 153), but he then leaves it aside in favor
of the term heterotopia. While the critical utopia (and the critical
dystopia of the 1990s) shares qualities of self-reflexivity and openness with
the postcolonial examples provided by Pordzik, however, it also continues to
work in a realist mode through a process of cognitive mapping that generates a
diagnostic and critical account of the totality of the oppressive society as
well as that of the resistant eutopia. Often informed by Marxist, feminist, and
ecological analyses or at least sensibilities and concerned not only with the
utopian society but also (in the spirit of William Morris) with the period of
rupture and transition from the old to the new, the critical utopia at least
offers a literary strategy that is more attuned to the process of social
negation and transformation of the existing society in the name of those who are
oppressed by it. My question, then, is whether in his wide-ranging study,
Pordzik would also recognize a separate critical utopian as opposed to
heterotopian development in his selection of postcolonial texts? Would the
application of the category of critical utopia (or some postcolonial relative)
to that intertext enable him to make further distinctions in his analyses, so
that a continuum rather than a simple binary opposition would be discovered
between the classical utopia and the postcolonial heterotopia, with varieties of
a more materially-based utopian and dystopian writing discovered in the space
between? My guess is that a number of the works he discusses could be read
fruitfully as critical utopias rather than heterotopias (or, indeed, as other
forms not yet described or named). Perhaps this would lead to a more complex set
of distinctions among this body of work—distinctions that could tell us more
about the individual works and the contexts out of which each emerges and to
which each responds.

Without such mediation between his stated
extremes, I think that Pordzik gives up too much. Leaping to the subjective and
the aesthetic and setting aside phenomena such as Marxism, armed struggle,
strategic essentialism, the nation, and rational thought and praxis seems a
dangerous project in a world that is in the process of once again undergoing
deep sociopolitical change as the corporate and military forces of capitalist
homogeneity endeavor to co-opt and control the very diversity and democracy that
Pordzik values. Stressing a radical but abstracted openness and not engaging
with actual processes of gaining and holding power (in the name of difference
but also of democracy, justice, and ecological sanity) in this current period
threatens to overlook one of the key places in which a concrete utopianism
operates—that is, within the very processes of transformation themselves and
not in some ideal that rises above these difficulties into the subjective and
spiritual (important as those are).

A related difficulty in Pordzik’s scheme
lies in his choice of a cross-cultural analysis that jumps rather quickly from a
specific locality to the realm of an alternative global culture (however welcome
and empowering that dream of an anti-capitalist global reality of diversity and
difference). When reading his treatments of particular novels, I wanted to know
more about the specifics of the historical contexts wherein such works were
produced and received and with which they most immediately engaged. Too often,
Pordzik’s reading proceeds almost exclusively at the level of the formal
signifier and links up with others in his chosen texts without taking time to
ground each in its own location and position. Thus, by privileging these
postmodern, postcolonial utopias as they advance a global pluralism while
distancing themselves from specific historical conditions and struggles, Pordzik
is in danger of making his critical argument more amenable to the reified
"liberal pluralism" asserted in the "millennial dreams" of a
globalizing economy and culture that simultaneously denies and co-opts the very
diversity and difference that gives rise to such writing in order to produce a
new docile (albeit cosmetically diverse) subject of planetary capitalism.2
By celebrating difference in such an aestheticized manner, Pordzik may well
erase the very pleasure and power of radical difference in all its lived
contexts.

All such cautions aside, this is an important
book. With it, Pordzik brings utopian studies into the realm of the
postcolonial. He thereby gives us many new texts and contexts to consider, and
he has established a basis for what can only be a useful and enlightening debate
about the fate and future of utopian writing. He especially casts fresh light on
the recent trend toward dystopian writing as he identifies the shared strategies
of the critical and postcolonial dystopia as they have evolved over the last
thirty or so years. Here, I want to end on a positive note by observing that
Pordzik sees in the postcolonial dystopia what Raffaella Baccolini sees in the
critical dystopia: both forms challenge not only the world outside but also the
tragic quality of the dystopian tradition, and both "maintain the utopian
impulse within the work" and thus "allow readers and
protagonists to hope by resisting closure" (Baccolini 18).

NOTES

1. On the continuing importance of the
diagnostic category of totality as opposed to totalitarian thought or rule, see,
among others, Jameson, Moylan, Smith, and Suvin.

2. For a critique of liberal pluralism, see
Gordon and Newfield; on "millennial dreams," see Smith. See, as well,
the argument made by Anu Dingwaney and Lawrence Needham.